Jim Hasse B.S., ABC, GCDF

Jim Hasse Quick Facts

As
owner of Hasse Communication Counseling, LLC. , Jim Hasse uses online
tools to provide one-on-one career coaching for baby boomers with
acquired disabilities who want to continue to work despite their newly
found vulnerabilities.

He has 10 years of experience in developing,
marketing and facilitating Web-based communities for disability
audiences plus 32 years in business communications (10 of them at the vice presidential level) for a Fortune 500 company.

He
is certified as a Global Career Develpoment Facilitator by the Center
for Credentialing & Education, Greensboro, NC, and is an Accredited
Business Communicator by the International Association of Business
Communicators, San Francisco, CA.

Jim has had cerebral palsy since birth.

Since 1998, he has worked as senior content developer for eSight Careers
Network ( www.esight.org ) , based in New York City, a web site which provides
comprehensive career management services for people with visual
impairments and other disabilities on a worldwide basis.

He has researched and written more than 200
extensively researched articles for eSight about disability employment
issues for job seekers, entrepreneurs and employers.

He's author of "Break Out: Finding Freedom When You Don't Quite Fit The Mold"
(Quixote Publications, 1996), a modern literary memoir of 51 short stories about what it means to be presumed different in the U.S. and abroad, and has had articles published in
numerous regional and national publications, including Careers &
disABLED, The Source, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin State
Journal and The Capital Times.

Jim grew up on a dairy farm in
Wisconsin, went to an orthopedic school in Madison for grade school and
then went back home again to attend a rural high school. In 1961, he
applied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison because he wanted to
study journalism, but he was turned down due to his disability (campus
too big and hilly, the admissions people said).

So, instead, he
went to the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, which was small and
flat. He couldn't get a journalism degree there, so he bought a pair of
crutches and learned to walk with them on the hills of his home farm -- and
was finally accepted at the Madison campus as a junior transfer student.

His
main motivation since grade school: to be self-reliant and to live
independently. Three months after he got his B.S. degree in 1965, he
received a call from the general manager of a local dairy cooperative
-- a guy who grew up with his mother in a town of 98 residents and had
previously hired Jim's uncle as an engineer. The general manager needed a newsletter editor
and offered Jim the job with the words: "We'll see how it works out..."

You can get a brief overview of Jim's career at www.esight.org/view.cfm?x=1722 which is a speech he gave in 2004 in Chicago at an Employer Recognition Breakfast.

Jim considers himself lucky to grow up in a place and time that was relatively
simple compared to the conditions in today's job market. Hehad an opportunity to develop his skills in the mainstream workplace. He
hadn't thought about disability employment issues until 1993.

In
1994, Jim decided to quit his job at that same dairy cooperative, which
had then grown into a Fortune 500 company, because he wanted to try
something else. He had been there 28 years and found that he was
repeating myself year after year in a comfortable grind even though his
responsibilities and scope of work had grown considerably. That's when
he wrote his book with the idea of using it a reference in an in-person
"Ready to Work" class for college students with disabilities.

He
soon found that he was not qualified yet to lead such a course. Now --
through the learning opportunities he's had at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and at eSight -- he's now facilitating an eight-week
online course, "Online Networking as a Job Search Tool,"
through the
eSight Learning Center in Manhattan from Madison, Wisconsin, where he
and his wife, Pam, live in a high-rise condo near the University of
Wisconsin campus.
It only took 15 years to make his dream come true.

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